The Filker and the Cats

Yesterday we ran the first true, real ballast water analyse. We drowned in work, literally. I don't know how we shall analyse samples in a time window of 24 hours, when the samples arrive at noon in our lab and are then already about ten hours old. Two workers need about 8 hours to do 2/3 of all analyses. Huh. What to do with the last third without one of us being cloned? Meh. No fun, really not.So folks, please have mercy on me when I am quiet and not as talkative as I use to be here on LJ - I simply have no time. And when I'm finally home, I'm too tired and headachy for phone calls. Sorrysorry!*hugs to all of you*

Some nicer announcements: we have baby fish again, two of our mouth-breeding mommys-to-be set their fry free yesterday night. It's interesting to see how even mouth breeders have different strategies. My hubby's Malawi cichlids have many (up to 30) very small eggs from which relatively small young hatch. They keep them in their mouth until they are fully developed and then set them free - about 30 very small baby fish.My Lake Tanganyika mouth breeding cichlid (a Cyprichromis) had less eggs, they were bigger and so are the young - abut 12 mm. Big babies compared to the tiny, 4-5 mm Malawi babies! :)

a) sounds like you should check delivery times or agree on a wider time window. Either they deliver within a few hours after sampling, or you need to set experiments up to be done within 48 hours instead of 24. It's not worth risking the whole project because of this.

b) awwwwww, baby fish! I never really understood why people kept aquariums, but reading your reports on it I am getting an idea now :-)